Social Good

We urgently need to talk about the grey areas of bad sexual encounters

"I'm sorry but I just don't buy it," a woman in her late twenties said to me. "I think that if a woman says "yes" at the outset then she can't claim any harm has occurred."

Sitting at a table full of strangers at a dinner party, I realised our conversation had ventured into uncomfortable territory. We were discussing the grey areas of bad sexual experiences; a topic that's opened up in the wake of the Aziz Ansari sexual misconduct allegations.

When we talk about "grey areas," we're talking about negative sexual experiences that result in women feeling harmed. As HuffPost's Emma Gray put it, this can be defined as "sex that feels violating even when it's not criminal." These experiences might not technically fall under a legal definition of sexual assault. We use the term "grey area" because we do not currently have the terminology to describe these experiences.

That conversation that took place at the dinner table in west London is one that has cropped up at countless social events over the past week. Judging by the bristly responses and bewildered expressions at that table, I realised this is area of sex talk that's seldom addressed. It's precisely this absence of knowledge about this area of bad sexual experiences that's stopping us from doing anything to prevent them.

A powerful thread by writer Ashley C. Ford shedded much-needed light on this topic when she recounted an uncomfortable conversation she had with a college roommate about sex. "Now technically, she had not been sexually assaulted. She never said no. She often said yes," wrote Ford. "But after years of men laying on top of her limp body and "taking what they can get," she had absolutely been harmed." Ford's roommate told her that when she had sex with her boyfriend she would "just lay there and let them do it." "You know like when you come home and you're drunk, or you're too tired, or you don't feel like it, but he's there and he wants to, so you just...kinda...let him," the roommate continued.

Me: Do you like having sex like that?Her: Well, I like him a lot.Me: Yeah, but when the TWO of you have sex TOGETHER do you get pleasure from the sex?Her: Sometimes. I guess I think of it as something I do for him. Like a thank you, or a compromise.

"She didn't feel like she should expect mutual pleasure from her sexual encounters. I couldn't understand why she wouldn't expect—nay, DEMAND—mutual pleasure from sex with another person," Ford noted. She'd identified in her thread the need for "more definitive language" to facilitate nuanced conversations about the "spectrum of harm" inflicted on women physically and psychologically as a result of these experiences.

This absence of language is one of the obstacles that's currently preventing us from having meaningful and nuanced discussions. Elsie Whittington— a PhD researcher at the University of Sussex who has a background in sexual health youth work—says that this grey area is "such a tricky topic" because "we don't really have a language for talking about it."

"We have, in the past, tended to only talk in extremes, or see extreme representations of violations," says Whittington. "Rape, exploitation and overt sexual violence on the one hand, and pleasurable, passionate, orgasmic (often heteronormative and white) sex represented in films, TV shows and porn." Whittington said that these "good examples of sex" tend not to show "explicit negotiation of consent."

Whittington says that there are worries that education and conversations surrounding the grey areas can undermine "messages about the importance of being clear about consent." But, Whittington states that, through her research, she's found that consent education can equip young people with the skills they need to communicate their choices during sex. "I think consent education is crucial—and needs to be taught—but in a way that doesn't only rely on the law and binaries of yes/no and rape/consent," says Whittington.

Susuana Amoah, founder of the I Heart Consent Campaign, is in agreement with Whittington about the need for greater consent education. "People need to remember that personal boundaries are different for everyone and that everyone has the right to have their boundaries respected. To avoid grey areas, it's important that people of all ages are educated about what sexual consent means and are able to have informed wider discussions about coercion, body language and abuse of power."

We are perhaps at the beginning of our conversations of grey areas. Cat Person—a recently publishedNew Yorker short story—explored, with a great deal of nuance, this particular realm of bad sex. This story proved profoundly resonant with many women because stories like these—about the reality of terrible sex and its emotional impact—are rarely told.

Yeah, right, she thought, and then he was on top of her again, kissing her and weighing her down, and she knew that her last chance of enjoying this encounter had disappeared, but that she would carry through with it until it was over. When Robert was naked, rolling a condom onto a dick that was only half visible beneath the hairy shelf of his belly, she felt a wave of revulsion that she thought might actually break through her sense of pinned stasis, but then he shoved his finger in her again, not at all gently this time, and she imagined herself from above, naked and spread-eagled with this fat old man’s finger inside her, and her revulsion turned to self-disgust and a humiliation that was a kind of perverse cousin to arousal.

Since the publication of Cat Person and Ford's thread, I've begun opening up to friends about my own grey area experiences. What I've since learned is that nigh-on every single one of my heterosexual female friends has their own grey area experience—and some of them have multiple. Now, in the #MeToo era, we're finally finding ways to open up and tell these uncomfortable stories, but one thing's becoming clear: we don't yet have terminology to describe the negative experiences that have befallen us.

So, how do we broach these uncomfortable conversations? The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf posited his belief that "singling out individuals"—like Aziz Ansari—isn't an "effective" way to explore "these thorny, noncriminal, nonworkplace flaws in sexual culture." Friedersdorf suggested that portrayals of sex in books, TV and movies are "much more constructive vehicles for hashing out the nuances of noncriminal, nonworkplace sex." And, if Cat Person's resonance is anything to go by, culture can be an effective medium for bringing these kinds of conversations to the forefront of our collective imaginations.

Sex that happens off screen and IRL is what's in urgent need of a drastic culture change, however. As well as having wider conversations about consent, sex education should look at the impact of what Rebecca Traister called "male sexual entitlement" —"the expectation that male sexual needs take priority" in hetero sex. We need better education about the verbal and nonverbal cues that can signal discomfort and distress during sex.

Conversations at dinner parties might not going to kickstart a revolution in the way we have sex—but they could be the spark that lights a fire. Talking to others about our own experiences of grey areas is a necessary step in raising awareness of the extent of the problem. That awareness, in turn, can then engender change. As a thread by @mitchellscomet points out, these grey areas exist and we need to find a way to address them. "Because the women in the grey areas are the ones that need our help and support the most."

If you have experienced sexual abuse, call the free, confidential National Sexual Assault hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), or access the 24-7 help online by visiting online.rainn.org.

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